Our subject is an innocent-looking sentence in “School aid reductions won’t harm students,” a recent op-ed from New York’s lieutenant governor, Robert Duffy. Discussing a state school system that he calls “large, expensive and underperforming,” Duffy writes:

It is the most expensive system in the country and the 34^th in the percentage of adults with high school diplomas, according to the Census Bureau.

Usually I read sentences like that without blinking an eye. Why did this one set my truth antennae to tingling?

Let’s unpack the sentence a bit. A strict reading doesn’t make sense, if you think about it. No school system contains adults with high school diplomas—not as students, anyway. Students in high schools are teenagers, generally, and they don’t have high school diplomas because they’re there to earn high school diplomas.

Now that’s clearly not what Duffy means. But what exactly does he mean? Perhaps he’s referring to graduation or dropout rates, in which case his statement makes sense as legitimate evidence. But maybe he meant that New York State itself—not the school system—ranks 34^th in the percentage of adults with high school diplomas. Now we’re on shaky ground, because all kinds of factors might influence that statistic. Does New York’s large population of immigrants skew the ranking? Do the data count immigrants’ diplomas, if earned in another country, as “high school diplomas”?  The answers to these questions might help us understand whether the “34” statistic really proves Duffy’s point.

OK, maybe I’m tilting at windmills here. But the point stands. People who debate an issue (as in op-ed pieces) naturally use statistics to bolster their case. There’s nothing wrong with that when it’s done in good faith, as Duffy (I believe) is doing here. Dialogue, however, is not debate. The spirit of dialogue, with its commitment to ferreting out the truth above making a case, demands that we weigh such statistics carefully, consider who is using them, and evaluate their relevance to the issue at hand.

This is extraordinarily hard work in today’s world, with reams of information cascading toward us every minute.  Our 24/7 information cycle requires us to have finely tuned truth antennae, so we can pick out strange fact usage quickly. Try this exercise: Next time you read an article, watch a video, or scan a blog, and you run across something cited as fact, take five seconds to weigh it. Does it make sense? Is it self-evident? Or is something just a little bit off—something that sets off your truth antennae?

Have you already run across things that fit into that “something off” category? Feel free to share them here.

That very day, Thomas Friedman wrote a column on a classic example of truth indifference: a report that the president’s recent trip to Asia cost $200 million a day. After Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.; no relation) cited the statistic as fact on Anderson Cooper’s CNN show, Cooper did some digging—and found only the flimsiest of sources for the story. Nonetheless, the “fact” had made its way into talk radio and the blogosphere.

Friedman’s column is invaluable (and great) reading all by itself, so I won’t try to summarize further. However, a few sentences in his final paragraph are worth repeating, because they eloquently capture the stakes involved in truth indifference: 

When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, we have a problem. It becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues—deficit reduction, health care, taxes, energy/climate—let alone act on them. Facts, opinions and fabrications just blend together.

The truth can be extremely difficult to ferret out. But only if we agree on the quest for truth—the commitment to stay open-minded, to separate fact from opinion, whatever the results—can we have any basis for dialogue across divides. 

Have you run across examples of truth indifference? Feel free to share them here.

to learn English

—bumper sticker

I saw this bumper sticker while driving up the interstate yesterday, and after the automatic cringe, it got me thinking about a much larger question than the wrangle over English speaking.

To get to that question, however, let’s probe the bumper sticker a bit more. It seems self-evident that learning the language of the country where you live carries many advantages. If I moved to France (please, O Lord), I could get a job, buy stamps, and find a good dentist way more easily by knowing and speaking French. On a broader level, I could contribute more of myself to my new community—through volunteering, writing, promoting political candidates, etc.—by knowing and speaking French.

So in the United States, learning English enables you to transact your business and make a difference in ways that not learning English can’t. Because of this, you might even say that Uncle Sam would be delighted if non-English-speakers learned English, so they can bring their whole selves to the public square.

None of that changes the fact that the bumper sticker is aggressive and cringeworthy. So here comes the larger question:

How on earth can we hear truth—even a grain of it—in an opinion expressed so offensively?

In an ideal world, of course, the people who express opinions this way would become more civil in their speech and their inner lives. In our imperfect world, there’s a strong temptation to simply ignore these folks. And to ignore any hint of what they express.

Maybe that’s the right thing to do. But here’s why it might not be.

I remember a cartoon in which one fellow at a bar said to another, “All I know is, if you’re against pollution, it can’t be all bad.” See the problem? As we dismiss someone we find obnoxious, we also dismiss his perspective—lock, stock, and barrel—and wind up in a place where we don’t want to be.

Examples? Here’s one to start us off: I’m very worried about the growth of the national debt. Have been since long before it became the cause célèbre of the right wing. But I find it very hard to express that opinion when the more rabid wing of the Tea Party has shouted it—and various distortions of it—from the housetops. I feel almost squeezed into the position of “If you’re against the national debt, it can’t be all bad.”

I’ll bet you can think of a hundred other examples. Go for it. Write about them in the Comments section below.